Afternoon all,

It seems that portage's self-protection from overload is incomplete - or so I've been led to believe by some pretty odd goings-on.

Injudicious fiddling with -j, --jobs and --load-average can easily cause miscompilation of packages without causing an OOM or any other sign of problems.

For some time, I had those values set to take advantage of the 24 threads and 64GB of RAM in this machine (not to mention 8 + 50GB swap, little of which appears ever to be used), resulting in the load average rising into three digits at times - over 200, even. But no sign of difficulty was shown and all appeared to have gone to plan. Until I ran the system, when odd errors would show. One example I remember is Firefox having a bizarre colour scheme (the window frame, not the page display) and missing the three upper-right buttons. That wasn't corrected by recompiling Firefox, so I assume the problem was
lower down.

I think I have some safe values now (time will tell), but it's worrying that compilation errors can go undetected. Of course I don't know where to start looking for the problem; I just hope someone else does.

Meanwhile, is it possible to set things up so that, say, qtwebengine is never compiled at the same time as anything else? I don't want to rely on my
noticing and intervening, and besides, it isn't always possible just to --exclude it.

--
Regards,
Peter.

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On Tue, 2023-05-02 at 15:04 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

One example I remember is Firefox having a bizarre colour scheme (the
window frame, not the page display) and missing the three upper-right buttons.
That wasn't corrected by recompiling Firefox, so I assume the problem was lower down.

This feels strongly to me like something in your compositor, rather
than Firefox itself.

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Peter,

On Tuesday, 2023-05-02 15:04:54 +0100, you wrote:

...
Meanwhile, is it possible to set things up so that, say, qtwebengine is never compiled at the same time as anything else? I don't want to rely on my noticing and intervening, and besides, it isn't always possible just to --exclude it.

What about

# emerge -1u qtwebengine && emerge -u @world

This will first update any dependencies of "qtwebengine" and only update "qtwebengine" itself when all its dependencies are dealt with, before it
will deal with the rest.

Sincerely,
Rainer

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On Tue, 2023-05-02 at 19:06 +0200, Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:

What about

   # emerge -1u qtwebengine && emerge -u @world

This will first update any dependencies of "qtwebengine" and only update "qtwebengine" itself when all its dependencies are dealt with, before it
will deal with the rest.

What if qtwebengine's (many) dependencies also need to be updated
first? I think trying to outsmart the dependency graphing in portage
is inviting frustration.

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